"Oh shit." Ross looked to the nearby Jesus for mercy.

Sebeck stepped in. "I'm trying to keep Jon's name out of the news. He's worried that Sobol will come after him."

"Interesting." She stood up and approached the dais. "Egotistical, but interesting."

She was lean and fit-probably about thirty years old. Sebeck couldn't help but notice her body and cursed his libido.

She gestured to the coffin. "I'm surprised you'd come hereif you thought Sobol was after you. He might have packed the coffin with C-four."

Ross stepped away from the casket warily.

She laughed. "Relax. We T-rayed it and swept the whole chapel for computers and wireless transmitters. Came up empty." She walked up and stood looking over Sobol's remains. "Apparently Sobol anticipated his unpopularity and left behind a program to carry out his funeral arrangements."

Sebeck frowned. "The Daemon did this?"

"It ordered the deluxe package from the funeral home's Web page-but it never had direct control over these objects. Just-in-time inventory; the coffin was built by Bates Corporation yesterday and shipped overnight by truck. We tailed it the whole way. The lilies arrived this morning. This is the mortuary equivalent of a number two combo."

Ross extended his hand. "Agent Philips." She shook it.

Sebeck extended his hand, too. "Detective-"

"— Sergeant Peter Sebeck," she finished for him. "My condolences on the deaths of your colleagues. It must be very hard to see this psycho in the flesh."

Sebeck nodded. "What's left of him." He looked down at the body. "I didn't expect him to look so…"

"Pitiful?"

"Yeah."

Philips viewed Sobol's remains, too. She gestured to the cross. "They say he found religion in the end."

A cold laugh came out of Sebeck. "I thought crosses burned vampires."

Ross changed the subject. "What's the NSA doing up here, Agent Philips? Isn't the big investigation down in Thousand Oaks?"

"I'm not a field agent. I'm a steganalyst."

Ross nodded, then answered Sebeck's quizzical look. "She finds hidden messages. Terrorists and drug traffickers sometimes hide data inside JPEGs and other computer files."

"I won't ask why you know that. My own parents don't understand what I do."

"So, what brings a steganalyst to Sobol's funeral?"

"Symbolism. Sobol's games are packed with symbols-and I'm not convinced all of them are harmless."

"What's that got to do with his funeral?"

"What's a funeral but a symbolic ritual? He's sending a message. Maybe to us, maybe to someone else."

"Perhaps. One thing's for sure, it got us all here."

She nodded grimly. "Yes, but it looks like the Feds have scared off anyone else."

Ross leaned in close. "You're trying to identify the Daemon's components, aren't you?"

The buzz- cut guy bristled in the pews. "Dr. Philips, remember your directive."

Ross stepped back. "Who's he?"

"Hard to say. I just call him The Major."

The Major didn't respond. He just stared.

Philips stepped into Ross's line of sight. "Mr. Ross, you played three hundred forty-seven hours of The Gatein the last year. That makes you the only CyberStorm game expert cleared by the FBI. You're on my list of people to talk to. As long as you're here, I've got a lot of questions about the MMORPG subculture."

"Three hundred forty-seven hours? That's embarrassing."

Sebeck smirked. "You need to get a life, Jon."

Philips pressed on. "What's your level of knowledge concerning the Ego AI and CyberStorm 3-D graphics engines?"

"You think Sobol's hidden components of the Daemon in his games?"

"Think texture maps-"

"Ahh…there'll be thousands of them."

"There are. That's not including custom maps created by individual users with the map editor."

"But why would Sobol bother? He could just as easily hide scripting files on some forgotten server. There's no reason to hide anything inside his games."

"Sobol's AI engine and CyberStorm's graphics codecs power a dozen popular games. You can understand why I'm pursuing this angle. They encompass tens of millions of installs worldwide."

"Have you interviewed the CyberStorm programmers?"

"We polygraphed them all. None knew anything about Sobol's plan-although plenty of them wrote code for purposes they didn't understand."

"That's no surprise. It's project management."

"Proximity card reader logs showed that Pavlos and Singh were in and out of Sobol's office wing all during the last year. Their workstations were physically replaced last month, and their hard-drive images contained nothing unusual."

"The lack of incriminating evidence is suspicious?"

"I'm saying they were working long hours on something together-something that's missing. And they were game developers. Some of the best in the business."

Ross considered this. "So that's why you think his games contain hidden data?"

She nodded. "The MMORPG world is a male-dominated subculture. I need a guide."

"A guide?"

"I need to see these games as a skilled player sees them-and I can't trust some twelve-year-old kid or a CyberStorm employee. I need secrecy."

"You don't want the Daemon to know what you're doing."

"Look, you're an IT professional. You know how dangerous this situation is. We don't know what the Daemon's up to, and we don't know how big it is."

The Major stood up. "Dr. Philips."

She turned and stabbed a finger in his direction. "If you're going to censor my conversations this entire damned trip, Major, then I'm heading back to Maryland. I, of all people, am acutely aware of the national security implications of this discussion, and I am having it because it is necessary.Do you read me?"

"I have my orders, Doctor."

"Well, then we have a situation-because my orders are to stop the Daemon, and apparently your orders are to stop me."

The Major stood impassively. She eyed him a bit longer, then turned back to Ross. "I need to derive the Daemon's topology in order to assess the threat."

It took Ross a moment to recover from her sudden outburst toward The Major. "You need its master plan."

"Yes. I'm developing a timeline of its creation so that we can correlate it with Sobol's real-world financial and travel activities. If I can reconstruct the development timeline, I might be able to infer its topology."

Sebeck interjected. "Topology?"

They both looked at him.

Philips sighed. "The physical or logical layout of a networked system."

Philips then looked back at Ross and continued. "But there are bigger worries." She cast an eye toward The Major, then pulled Ross aside, conferring with him privately. This close, Agent Philips had a slight flowery scent that was surprisingly feminine. Ross saw the sharp intellect in her eyes, the intensity. A slight hot flash spread over his skin as he relished this intimacy.

Philips was oblivious. "Huge amounts of money flowed from Sobol's bank accounts immediately after his death. ACH wire transfers totaling tens of millions of dollars went offshore. He also took out large lines of credit in the months before his death. This money, too, went overseas the day he died. The Feds are still tracing it. Picture the combination of a widely distributed, compartmentalized application with high failover tolerance-perhaps thousands of copies of each component, able to reconstitute itself if any x-percentage of its components are destroyed."

Ross was nodding as she talked. God, this woman was razor sharp. He found his normal resistance to all thoughts not his own falling away.

She continued, "Now combine an application like that-a widely distributed entity that never dies-with tens of millions of dollars and the ability to purchase goods and services. It's answerable to no one and has no fear of punishment."